In: Biology
In a world where humans lived in comfort and lived up to 100 years then died in their sleep, after 100 years of this kind of world would human populations no longer evolve? in your answer reference, darwins postulated mechanisms for evolution by natural selection. what would it mean to say that human populations stopped evolving? And could we use the Hardy Weinberg Analysis in this context?
Survival of the fittest is the main gist of the natural
selection. A world where there is no quest for survival and all the
conditions are kept relatively constant ( no climate change,
natural disaster) then there won't be any evolution.
The humans will be living to their maximum potential and there will
be no need for evolution as they will be cent percent adapted to
their world.
One good example is crocodiles. The group crocodyliomorpha
originated some 200 mya. Since then, they have reduced in size but
they are basically unchanged since the time of dinosaurs (85 mya)
.( read some interesting articles related to why crocodiles have
stopped evolving and you will be amazed) one of the main reason
they have stopped evolving is that they don't need any more
modifications for the continuation of their species. They have very
good predation stragtegy and also their niche has been very
constant in last few millions of years.
So, if the niche is fairly constant and the organism is well
adapted to survive in it , it very less likely that it will
evolve.
in the picture above I have given logic about how natural selection
takes place ( in blue) and why it doesn't apply to the population
in the given question ( in red) .
To say that the human population has stopped evolving is saying that no new traits are being selected by the environment and the phenotype is mostly unchanged over time.
hardy- Weinberg equilibrium can be used to study this change. In this equilibrium, if the allele frequency in a given population changes, then there is evolution. However, in non-evolving population this allele frequency remains relatively constant over a period of time